KIRKUS REVIEW

An award-winning young author uses Charles Manson and his
followers as the inspiration for her first novel.

Evie Boyd is in a city park the first time she sees the girls.
With their bare feet and long hair and secondhand dresses they offer a vision
of life beyond her suburban, upper-middle-class experience. “Like royalty in
exile,” they suggest the possibility of another world, a world separate from the
wreckage of her parents’ marriage, from the exacting lessons gleaned from teen
magazines, from the unending effort of trying to be appealing. What 14-year-old
Evie can’t see that day is that these girls aren’t any freer than she is.
Shifting between the present and the summer of 1969, this novel explores the
bitter dregs of 1960s counterculture. Narrating from middle age, Evie—like the
reader—knows what’s going to happen. But Evie has had decades to analyze what
she did and what was done to her, and Cline peoples her version of this
oft-examined story with carefully crafted characters. The star in Evie’s solar
system isn’t Russell, the Manson stand-in. Instead, it’s Suzanne, the young
woman who becomes Evie’s surrogate mother, sister, lover,
and—finally—protector. This book is, among other things, a love story. Cline
makes old news fresh, but she also succumbs to an MFA’s fondness for
strenuously inventive language: “Donna spooked her hands dreamily.” “The words
slit with scientific desire.” “I felt the night churn in me like a wheel.” These
metaphors are more baffling than illuminating. And Evie’s conclusion that
patriarchal culture might turn any girl deadly feels powerfully true at first
but less so upon reflection. Suzanne and her accomplices don’t turn on their
oppressor like righteous Maenads; instead, they sacrifice themselves on his
behalf. And there’s also the simple fact that very few girls become mass
murderers.

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INTERVIEW WITH EMMA CLINE

In late 2014, the publishing world was abuzz with news of a debut, non-celebrity writer striking a $2 million dollar book deal. At the center of the deal, The Girls was purported to be loosely based on some of the people surrounding Charles Manson; the author, who had just a ...

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